Recently, portable terminals such as smartphones, tablet terminals, and the like have been popular. The portable terminals may have a function of receiving airwaves of television broadcasts or a function of accessing the Internet. A user of such a portable terminal can browse or watch TV or music contents.
Some portable terminals can retrieve a content, which is predicted based on user information (about a user), popularity information (about a degree of popularity), or the like, from among a plurality of contents such as broadcasted TV programs and provide the retrieved content to the user (e.g., see Patent Document 1).
Additionally, some portable terminals can divide contents of a program which is being broadcast through each channel into a plurality of chapters and compute a score for each chapter in accordance with a degree of activity (which increases by a home-run scene in a broadcast program of a baseball game or a goal scene in a broadcast program of a soccer game) obtained from the channel. Based on the computed scores, the most recommended chapter for the user is reproduced sequentially (e.g., see Patent Document 2).
Furthermore, some portable terminals can simultaneously display images of a main program and a sub-program. When the sub-program becomes lively, main output sound is switched from the sound of the main program to the sound of the sub-program (e.g., see Patent Document 3).
In addition, users post image or text data utilizing a social networking service such as a Twitter (registered trademark) or a Facebook (registered trademark) so as to share recent circumstances or present ideas on a Web page. When observing the state of posting the information posted as described above, it is possible to predict that when the state of posting is lively, the relevant TV program is popular and that when the state of posting is not lively, the relevant TV program has a low popularity.